Influencer marketing seems to be the method that every business can implement in their digital marketing strategy to overcome changing customer habits. It maxes out word-of-mouth marketing, works on many social media channels, and reaches tight audiences. It produces more conversions and a higher return on investment, but to make it work, you’ll need to communicate your expectations effectively and consistently to influencers.
Creating an influencer marketing campaign involves a lot of back-and-forth conversations with influencers and updates on your part. Your best shot is to follow up on each step of your influencer outreach, negotiation, and content approval processes to avoid getting lost in the abundance of messages and spreadsheets. With the right influencer relationship management tool, this can be executed without hassle.
This article will walk you through everything you need to know about influencer relationship management and show how HypeAuditor’s IRM platform, My Network, can help you organize your influencer network and coordinate your communication with prospects to reflect what stage your campaign is at.
What is Influencer Relationship Management?
Influencer Relationship Management (IRM) is the process of building and maintaining long-term partnerships with creators. Instead of treating influencer marketing as a one-time activation, IRM focuses on ongoing collaboration: tracking conversations, campaign stages, and content performance across multiple touchpoints. It works much like a CRM, but specifically designed for managing creator relationships.
The goal is to stay organized as your influencer network grows. With the help of influencer relationship management software, brands and agencies can keep track of outreach, follow-ups, contract status, and past collaborations in one place. This creates a clear view of your creator ecosystem and makes it easier to plan future campaigns and maintain consistent communication.
Why is Influencer Relationship Management Important?
When you work with multiple creators, it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks. Messages get buried, deadlines get missed, and sometimes the same person is contacted twice by different teams. Influencer relationship management helps prevent that by giving you a clear structure to manage each relationship properly.
It also helps you build trust with the people you work with. Influencers aren’t vendors. They’re creative partners. The more organized and thoughtful you are in managing that partnership, the more likely it is they’ll want to work with you again.
Here’s why IRM matters:
It keeps all communication and campaign history in one place
It helps your team avoid repeating tasks or miscommunicating
It gives creators a better experience, which leads to better work
It makes it easier to spot who’s a strong long-term partner
It supports consistent planning across different campaigns
Strong relationships take time, but managing them well makes everything smoother for your brand and for the creators you work with.
Stages of Influencer Relationship Management
Influencer relationships move through three clear stages. Treating each stage with care shapes smoother campaigns and stronger partnerships. Here’s how it typically works:
1. Finding and Recruiting Influencers
Start by spotting creators whose voice, content, and audience feel right for your brand. Look at how they speak to their followers, the topics they cover, and whether their community overlaps with your target market. Record those details in your influencer relationship management software, then send a message that shows you understand their work and why a partnership makes sense.
2. Building Positive Relationships During Collaboration
Once a creator comes on board, set clear goals, timelines, and deliverables. Share a brief that spells out what success looks like while leaving room for their creative approach. Stay available for questions, give prompt feedback, and acknowledge good work. These steps build trust and make future projects easier to arrange.
3. Tracking and Evaluating Performance
After content goes live, collect the important numbers like engagement, reach, clicks, sales; along with any qualitative feedback from the creator and your team. Log everything in your IRM tool so you have a single view of how the collaboration went. This record helps you decide who to invite back and how to refine your process next time.
How to Manage Influencer Relationships?
Now that you’ve seen the three stages of influencer relationship management, here’s how to build and manage your influencer relationships.
Communicate clearly and regularly: Good communication using collaboration tools are essential to streamline this process. Make sure you respond to every question and talk over emerging issues with influencers as soon as possible. Additionally, inform them of every update or change made to the campaign. Set a preferred channel—email, chat, or the IRM platform—so nothing gets missed.
Stay flexible: Listen to creators’ ideas, be open to their opinions, and let them unleash their creativity. Their audience insights can spark fresh angles your brand team might overlook.
Provide them with necessary resources: You can’t expect an influencer to talk about your products or services unless they try them out. Send them samples, provide them access to exclusive events, and share relevant information with them.
Build trust: Stay honest and transparent and stick to your agreement. And don’t forget to appreciate their contribution to your success! Paying on time and crediting their work publicly go a long way toward a lasting partnership.
Give them incentives: You can motivate influencers by offering them reimbursement or exclusive services if they reach certain milestones. Tailor rewards to outcomes that matter to you both, such as sales generated or content quality scores.
Monitor their performance: Honesty and clear communication also mean you track the results of their content, which helps you optimize your working relationship with them.
Use the right influencer relationship management platform: A tool like HypeAuditor’s My Network pulls every brief, message, and metric into one place, making each of these steps easier to handle.
What Is the My Network IRM and What Is It capable of?
My Network is HypeAuditor’s influencer relationship management tool that helps you build a network of creators and manage all your communication with them. Tracking influencer messages within a single platform and updating influencer status helps avoid misunderstandings among colleagues. As your campaign moves forward, the entire marketing team is kept informed about the recruitment and negotiation process, including discussions linked to compensation and contract.
How does My Network help you manage influencer relationships?
Although each collaboration is different, there are several steps that are common to all. You have to identify and recruit creators, negotiate legal and payment terms, send them briefs and contracts, and discuss and approve their content. The more influencers you keep in touch with, the more time it takes you to follow and coordinate your communication.
In My Network, you and your team can keep track of your progress and changes with the help of categories, called statuses. We differentiate three groups on our platform: Influencer, Payment, and Contract. In each of these groups, there are pre-defined statuses. However, once you start interacting with influencers, you may want to create additional ones to get a clear idea of where you stand in the negotiation procedure.
Setting Up My Network and Tracking Your Influencer Relations
Assume you want to partner with several influencers in a multi-social media campaign. You and your team already have a couple of names in mind, but you decide to expand your list of potential influencers. Here’s how we recommend you proceed:
1. First, look for influencers in Influencer Discovery and add those who seem a good fit to My Network. Every influencer will be given the Prospects status automatically when you add them to My Network.
Pre-made influencer statuses in HypeAuditor's My Network
2. Before you start contacting potential creators and assigning them another status, examine their profiles by filtering out those with Poor and Fair AQS. In case you need only a few first-rate influencers, keep those who have Good, Very Good, and Excellent AQS. Check their follower size too, as it will affect the number of people you will reach through them. Set Rejected status for influencers who don't make it past your first round of selection and create a Shortlisted category for those who met your criteria.
3. At this point, the size of the campaign determines how to proceed: outreach or analysis.
A large campaign - or more campaigns - with several hundred influencers will require reaching out to them en masse first, then analyzing those who responded. If that is the case for you, then move on to step 4.
If, however, you’re planning a small campaign with a few creators, continue analyzing shortlisted influencers’ profiles individually considering the criteria below.
Examine if their content fits your brand’s values and ideas.
Study their audience demographics separately or compare them to your target audience with Influencer Comparison. This feature lets you set your target audience’s location, age, and gender and measures it against the audience of your prospects, making it easier to remove low-match creators from your list.
Review levels of education, income and the audience’s interests if necessary for your campaign.
Explore the growth chart and opt for creators and bloggers who are steadily growing their following.
Set your budget, estimate costs, and rate influencers based on their fees and the impacts of a possible collaboration.
Last, but not least, look at their brand safety analysis and weed out those who pose a risk to your business.
Creators who don’t match your requirements will be marked as Rejected. Those who pass your second screening can be included in a new type, called Selected.
4. Now that you’ve finished creator discovery and analysis, it’s time to move on to the outreach phase. Contact influencers en masse within our platform by either using one of our easily customizable templates or crafting your own message. To ensure that all your team members are kept in the loop, add a new status: Contacted to creators.
5. In a few days, you’ll see who answered and who didn’t, allowing you to create other statuses. Creators who didn’t react to your first message will be added to the Not replied or Needs following up category. Thus, you can follow them up either by email or send them a DM on social media. Influencers interested in collaborating with your business can be listed as Negotiating and those who turned you down ought to be marked as Rejected.
Having contacted hundreds of influencers en masse for a massive campaign, you can now analyze the creators who are interested in collaborating. Take a look at the points discussed in step 3 again.
6. This brings us to the negotiation phase, which involves discussing the campaign’s message and goals, the format and the timeline of deliverables, compensation, and legal requirements. Since you must consult several topics before signing the contract, we recommend you add as many statuses as you see fit, for example, Brief sent.
7. When every collaboration detail is agreed upon, you can start preparing the contract. Make sure to add influencers in the Contract sent status who received the document and give the ones who already signed it the Contract signed status. All pre-defined statuses related to the contract are grouped under the contract category.
8. Settling the terms of payment is a prominent element of your dialogue. You should create various statuses that refer to the actual compensation stage if, for example, you offer pre-payment for the influencer, you must create a Pre-payment made status under the Payment category.
9. Once the contract has been signed by both parties, you can ask influencers to create their content draft. As you go along with the approval process, you assign them new statuses accordingly, such as Waiting for draft and Draft approved.
10. Finally, you have arrived at your campaign launch, but before you shift your focus on measuring your campaign KPIs make sure to mark creators who published their posts as Content posted. Depending on how you agreed, also indicate when the influencer has been paid completely (Paid fully) or partially (50% paid) or if the payment is still pending for some reason (Payment pending).
An example of creator collaboration workflow and various influencer statuses in My Network for smaller campaigns
An example of creator collaboration workflow and various influencer statuses in My Network for large campaigns
Start Building Your Influencer Network!
As we already mentioned, the above is just one example of how you can streamline your influencer management workflow with My Network. We know that each campaign is unique and may require other categories but with our tool, you can easily organize influencers and coordinate communication with them in one place. Take a look around at our tool, and test how easily you can manage your influencer network and track negotiations.
